Though he called it “one of the most irresponsible pieces of journalism … I have seen in over 15 years working in the business,” the National Observer’s Michael De Souza failed to convince the National NewsMedia Council (the press council that covers Ontario and some other provinces) to agree with his condemnation of a Financial Post article about pipelines. The decision noted that De Souza did not give concrete examples of any factual inaccuracies or journalistic malfeasance on the part of the piece in question.

At the CRTC

I tried to get some clarification from the CRTC about the status of CFNV 940 AM, whose deadline to launch passed on Nov. 21. A spokesperson tells me: “As per staff information and on the Commission’s record, 7954689 Canada Inc. has informed the Commission that it was ready to commence operations. A licence will be issued once the Commission will have received a copy of all the documents from the Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada Ministry.” Further clarification later: “The applicant has advised the Commission before its deadline and the deadline was met.” So the station can launch legally without requesting a further extension. We’re still waiting on a decision from the commission on an extension request for the English-language station at 600 AM, whose deadline passed Nov. 9.

The commission is cutting staff at its regional offices as it restructures to work more virtually. The offices will remain open, but will have reduced services for the public. It used to be to read applications at the CRTC you had to go to a regional office and look through files. Now, everything is available online, and about the only time you hear about regional offices are when talking about individual commissioners or when someone appears at a hearing via teleconference.

The commission has approved (with no public process) transfers of ownership of two independent TV specialty channels:

GameTV, from Kilmer Enterprises (owned mainly by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment chairman and minority owner Lawrence Tanenbaum) to Leonard Asper’s Anthem Sports & Entertainment (which also owns Fight Network and FNTSY Sports Network) for $4 million. GameTV is one of the few specialty services to not charge a wholesale fee to TV providers. It’s unclear if this will continue under its new owner. The acquisition was announced in August. Asper tells the commission the channel is unprofitable, but synergies might help the group turn toward profitability.

OUTtv, from James Shavick to Ronald N. Stern (via several holding companies), for $850,000. Stern is a major entrepreneur, and owns FP Newspapers, which owns the Winnipeg Free Press.

TV

Shaw has informed the CRTC it will shut down CJBN-TV in Kenora, Ont., Canada’s smallest television station, both in terms of power (178W) and audience. What little local programming it has (including the weekly Good Morning Sunset Country) will be taken over by the Shaw TV community channel after it closes on Jan. 27. Shaw owned CJBN before it bought Global TV, and chose never to bring CJBN fully into the Global family. When Shaw Media was sold to Corus, Shaw kept the station. This summer, as Shaw was seeking renewal of its TV licences, the CRTC said it must either increase its local programming from 30 minutes to seven hours a week, or seek an exception to the policy. Shaw decided in mid-November it would pull the plug. Three jobs are being cut, and two others are moving to Shaw TV.

There’s pressure from both sides of a controversial issue at the FCC in the United States: Whether to weaken protections of Class A AM stations (so-called clear channel stations) so that smaller stations don’t have to drastically reduce (or even eliminate) their signals at night. The big clear-channel stations are on one side, while smaller Class D stations are on the other. These protections are why stations from far-away markets like Chicago, New York and Boston can be heard here at night, and conversely why Montreal Class A stations — TSN 690, CKAC Circulation 730 and the upcoming 940 AM station — can be heard from as far away and even farther.

Print

Le Devoir launched a new smartphone application. It’s simple, with a continuous stream of stories in several sections (starting with À la une) and limited ability to customize. But it’s pretty, allows some flexibility in notifications, and allows favouriting of articles. Best of all, it’s well integrated with the website, so sharing stories between the app and desktop or social media users is seamless. The app is free until March 1, after which it will be available only to subscribers.

Transcontinental says its media division is no longer a core part of its business. This is usually a hint that such a division would be for sale, but more likely in this case it’s just an acknowledgment that Transcontinental’s printing division is by far its bigger money-maker. Transcontinental Media (now TC Media) has radically transformed through acquisitions and sales in recent years. It owns Métro in Montreal and most community newspapers in Quebec.

News about people

Craig Silverman is the new media editor for BuzzFeed. In addition to leading the BuzzFeed Canada team in Toronto, he’ll be continuing his lifelong mission of chronicling media screwups (he was the guy who started the sadly now defunct Regret the Error corrections website).

James Bradshaw, who took over the media beat at the Globe and Mail from Steve Ladurantaye, is switching to covering banking in January. The Globe will find someone else to cover media, but an announcement on who will fill that job hasn’t been made yet.

Tanya Lapointe, who was an arts reporter with Radio-Canada but took a leave of absence a year ago, has decided not to return. She began a relationship with director Denis Villeneuve, who has been very busy of late with Hollywood movies, and she’s been helping him with them.

At the CRTC

Aboriginal Voices Radio, the organization that ran radio stations in major cities that were to target indigenous Canadians in urban communities, has lost its case at the Federal Court of Appeal to have it reverse a CRTC decision revoking its licences for blatant violation of its conditions of licence. This clears the way for the commission to order the stations off the air and proceed with applications from other groups to launch new indigenous stations on those frequencies in those cities. The decision says the CRTC has received 12 applications from five groups for new stations in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa.

The CRTC is giving itself an extra year (so until August 2018) to deal with licence renewals for several independent television services, including Super Channel, Family Channel, Évasion, Silver Screen Classics, Explora, Télémagino, Rewind, Wild TV, Playmen, NTV in St. John’s, CFTV-DT in Leamington, Ont., and some ethnic channels. This will bring their licences in line with other CBC and independent services so that new conditions of licence can be implemented for all of them at the same time.

The CBC has published its quarterly financial report (PDF). It shows increases in both revenues and expenses mainly related to broadcasting the 2016 Olympics. There was also a $1 million drop in revenue from subscriptions to specialty channels (CBC News, RDI, ARTV, Explora and Documentary).

Videotron looks to finally add The Comedy Network and CTV News Channel in high definition (though only for subscribers with next-generation Illico boxes), according to illicotech.com. Others are MTV Canada, E!, Gusto, Nickelodeon Canada, Treehouse and Haiti HD. There are still some more it could upgrade, like TVO, BNN and MSNBC, but Comedy and CTV News, both owned by Bell Media, were probably the most in demand.

Radio

Print

Rogers has let its staff — and the public — know what’s happening to its French consumer magazines. It’s keeping Châtelaine, though like its English counterpart it will go down to only six issues a year. L’actualité is in the midst of a sale process. And it couldn’t find a buyer for LouLou, so that magazine is shutting down in both languages. About 60 employees will lose their jobs, though some of those could be rehired if L’actualité is sold. Rogers is meeting with staff at English magazines today (including Maclean’s) to detail staff cuts on that side.

Online

Média Boutique, which works on a business model started at Voir in which businesses buy ads through gift cards that media then sell to consumers at discounted rates, is growing its client base. It has signed with V and RNC Media.

More news about specific people cut at Postmedia should come this week as the deadline for responses to buyout applications passes. Some Citizen staff like Ian MacLeod, Janet Wilson and Jason Fekete announced their departures already on Twitter.

News about news

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has published a post explaining the measures his company will take to combat fake news. The task is a delicate one, both because fake news is hard to identify in a way everyone will agree with, and because Facebook doesn’t want to put itself in a position of having to censor the Internet.

La Presse has suspended columnist Suzanne Colpron after discovering her stories had repeatedly plagiarized quotes from other publications, including Le Devoir. The suspension is indefinite, and surprisingly not permanent. La Clique du Plateau notes that one of Colpron’s recent columns denounced Melania Trump for plagiarizing Michelle Obama in her speech at the Republican National Convention.

CBC remains a punching bag at Canadian Heritage committee hearings. Here’s the Globe and Mail. This week at the CRTC, TVA and V piled on, and today Maxime Bernier, candidate for the Conservative leadership, pledged to reduce the CBC’s budget. They all seem to agree on one point: The CBC should not have government subsidies to compete with private broadcasters and news outlets. CBC’s Hubert Lacroix finally had enough and wrote an open letter to the committee defending its existence.

Donald Trump met with the New York Times, after the meeting was originally called off over a difference about what was on and off the record. The transcript is here.

Access to information requests are often used by journalists to get things like emails between government officials that were never meant to be public. Some have even used the law to get access to emails that talk about how a government agency will respond to a journalist’s request. But Winnipeg police made use of the law for an inventive purpose: Looking into a journalist. The journalist had inquired about a police officer accused of drug trafficking, and the police queried the justice department for records about communications with the journalist. Needless to say, the media is very concerned about this.

The CRTC gave one-year licence renewals to major cable companies after reviewing how they’re handling their obligations to provide pick-and-pay channels (even though they only come into effect fully next week). The decision establishes “best practices” to not screw over customers, but doesn’t establish any new conditions of licence. It won’t regulate set-top box prices (which aren’t included in the $25/month skinny basic), or the price of individual channels (which are high enough to make it more expensive than buying packages) or prohibit IPTV providers from requiring Internet service be purchased first to get TV, but it suggests that providers who don’t follow these “best practices” might have conditions imposed on them next year. The one-year licence renewal isn’t punishment, but rather because many other issues related to their licences haven’t been explored yet, including community television programming, which has several outstanding complaints for major providers.

TV

Videotron has launched its new TV packaging strategy online in advance of next week’s implementation of the new CRTC pick-and-pay regulations (though Videotron was already largely compliant and had been for years). The focus is still on custom packages, with sports channels being available at a higher tier. Most channels cost $5 à la carte, while TSN 1-5, Sportsnet regional channels, RDS 1/2 and TVA Sports 1/2 cost $15 each, the same as premium channels like TMN/HBO. In most cases it’s easier to take a pick-your-own package than build one à la carte, but there isn’t a very good option for people who want a lot of the cheaper channels.

VMedia, a new TV distribution company based in Ontario, has lost a court case against Bell Media after it launched a new service that distributed television signals over the Internet to Roku devices. VMedia interpreted its system as being part of its licensed distribution service, while Bell argued successfully that it was actually an online over-the-top service that requires Bell’s permission to rebroadcast CTV and CTV Two. The judge said ultimately it should be the CRTC resolving this issue. Allowing licensed distributors to offer channels over-the-top would allow them to compete nationwide without setting up expensive wired networks or leasing space from cable and phone companies.

Le clan, a Radio-Canada drama series about a man living in rural Quebec under a witness protection program, that the network buried on Saturday nights during its first season, has been picked up for a U.S. pilot in English. Maybe this, along with its popularity here, will convince the broadcaster that the show is more than just a way of fulfilling its obligations to have some dramatic television produced outside of Montreal.

30 vies, the English version of 19-2 and CBC’s Interrupt This Program were all nominated for the International Emmy Awards. They all came back emptyhanded.

Canadiens behind-the-scenes docu-infomercial 24CH is back for a fifth season on Canal D, RDS, CTV Montreal and TSN. The first episode aired in French last Saturday and will air in English tonight at midnight on TSN5 and Saturday at 1:30pm on CTV Montreal. French episodes air Saturdays 6pm on Canal D and 6:30pm on RDS.

Vice has launched Viceland in France. In Quebec, V told the CRTC on Tuesday that Vice shows will begin airing on V and MusiquePlus in February. A Quebec Viceland channel is also planned some time in 2017.

Radio

CFNV 940 AM had a deadline of Monday, Nov. 21, to launch. It’s broadcasting music with recorded messages asking people to report reception/interference issues, which suggests it’s still in the on-air testing phase. I’ve asked the CRTC for clarification on its status. In the meantime, it has a Twitter account, which notes in a reply that regular programming should begin at the beginning of 2017. Still no website, or even really a brand beyond its frequency. And a video posted last month and then deleted, in which partner Nicolas Tétrault shows off the transmitter site, has been reposted to YouTube.

A Winnipeg Free Press profile of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network notes that it plans a U.S. expansion, but also that it has made a proposal to re-establish a network of urban indigenous radio stations that was once Aboriginal Voices Radio. AVR lost its licences for stations in Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver last year after the CRTC decided its repeated violations of licence conditions were too much. It has called for new applications for those frequencies, with indigenous stations given priority, but that process is on hold while AVR appeals the CRTC’s decision.

Online/other

Gilbert Rozon has apologized after an ad for Montreal’s 375th anniversary showed only white Quebec artists. Rozon is rightfully accepting the blame, but it’s as much an indication of the whiteness of the artistic community (particularly its biggest stars) as it is the cluelessness of the organizing committee.

Wind Mobile, now owned by Shaw, has been renamed as Freedom Mobile. The Globe and Mail suggests they didn’t just go with Shaw Mobile mainly because they need to improve the network before attaching that brand to it.

News about people

Andray Domise, a columnist for Maclean’s and former co-host of the Canadaland Commons podcast, has been charged with domestic violence. He says he was actually the one being abused in the relationship.

Geoffré Samson, a journalist with Charlevoix radio station CIHO-FM, got into trouble with his boss when he complained during the FPJQ conference about the local MNA getting mad if he didn’t follow the spin of her press releases. She immediately took charge and arranged for the station to apologize. The journalist says he was misinterpreted.

Good reads

A fake news writer speaks to the Washington Post about how right-wing people don’t fact-check his stories and he feels bad that Donald Trump, who he hates, has ended up in the White House because of people like him and conspiracy theories and false information like what he peddles that people eat up.

But the real story, not mentioned at all in that article, is that Barry Morgan, who hosted noon to 3pm weekdays, has been let go. His name and photo disappeared from the station’s website over the weekend, and Ken Connors has been moved to his time slot this week to fill in.

Roberts resigned from the anchor chair at Global Toronto last year after a Toronto Star investigation found that he owned a PR firm and his clients were appearing on his show without any disclosure. CJAD’s story about Roberts’s hiring makes no mention of this, but it does note that Roberts’s father and grandfather all worked for CJAD.

“That happened nearly two years ago and he was out of the industry for a spell, but he has moved on, and we’re moving on. We’re turning the page. There is absolutely zero reason to be concerned about that issue going forward. Leslie has been so transparent about it all, so above board, in order to have a clean slate going forward.”

Asked whether Roberts still has ties to BuzzPR, Bury said he “no longer has a stake in any PR company. And, as with anyone on the station, we insist that any potential conflict of interests be declared and we manage them proactively.”

Jon Pole, who hosted The Night Side Mondays and Tuesdays, will take over Hall’s shifts the rest of the week, at least for now, Bury said. “We don’t have anything finalized but I’m a huge fan of his creativity and drive.”

Schnurmacher’s hour-long show is being billed as a way for him to reduce his schedule so he can focus on other projects. He’ll be bringing his Gang of Four with him to his new time.

Station management had no comment about Morgan’s departure and Morgan himself could not be reached for comment. But Bury told Brownstein that “I wish him the very best. The industry is constantly evolving, and sometimes that means making hard choices.”

After occasional sputters of an audible tone a few hours a day over a few weeks, 940 AM has actual audio for the first time in almost seven years as TTP Media’s first AM radio station has officially begun testing.

The programming consists of music in English and French, with a 23-second announcement about the station about every 15 minutes confirming its callsign of CFNV and asking people with reception issues to call 1-855-732-5940. It says the station will launch “progressivement sous peu” or “très bientôt” (the message varies slightly).

CFNV will be a French-language talk station when it launches, which the CRTC has said it must do by Nov. 21. The licence was first authorized in 2011, and the deadline extended three times (one more than usual).

The deadline to launch an English station at 600 AM passed on Nov. 9. The CRTC confirms to me it has received an application for an extension to that deadline (which was supposed to be final) but has not made a decision yet.

940 AM, which is assigned to Montreal as a clear channel, so this station will have a very large footprint at night, was last used by AM 940, a Corus-owned station that began as 940 News and kept cutting resources and changing formats until it finally shut down in 2010.

There are plenty of stories about journalists and minorities being the targets of online verbal abuse. This one from a Washington Post fact-checker is interesting, if only because the subject started asking questions of her abusers and found many of them backed down quickly when they realized they were shouting at a real person.

Blacklock’s Reporter, the paywalled news service covering the federal government, has lost a court case against the people they’re reporting on after they found out that one of the publication’s articles was shared among staff at the Finance Department who didn’t subscribe to the publication. The judge found the sharing over email clearly fell under the fair dealing protection.

CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais gave a keynote speech to the Canadian chapter of the International Institute of Communications today. The speech goes over the past four years of the commission’s work (what a coincidence, that happens to be the amount of time he’s been there) and is mainly self-congratulatory. He also criticizes Canada’s television creative community for overstating the effect of a reduction in Canadian content requirements, he criticizes the “news media” for “spilled ink and exhaled air”, he criticizes online media for not having the training to replace traditional media reporters, he criticizes Shomi for pulling the plug too early and being lazy, and he criticizes “naysayers” in general for making “false and misleading statements.”

Radio

Last week the deadline passed for the launch of the TTP Media station at 600 AM in Montreal. The commission confirmed to me that an application for an extension to that deadline has been filed, but no decision has been reached yet. The last extension said it would be the final one, but the CRTC said the same two years ago about 940 and gave another extension anyway. They have until Nov. 21 to inform the commission that they are ready to launch the 940 station, which has been doing some on-air testing.

Print

Friday was the last day for two managers at the Montreal Gazette whose jobs are being eliminated as part of the latest major staff cut at Postmedia: Photo editor Marcos Townsend and newsroom administrator June Thompson. The latter, who has been holding the newsroom together for decades, got a special drawing from the local cartoonist.

The CBC issued a press release defending its legal threats against podcast app developers who use ads to get revenue from those apps. Because the apps can be used to download CBC podcasts, it’s considered a commercial use of those podcasts, and the CBC says they need permission. The broadcaster is interpreting someone downloading a podcast using a podcast app as the podcast developer making “use” of CBC content.

At the CRTC

The commission has released what it calls a policy about blocking of nuisance phone calls. It addresses the main points of the policy (What is a nuisance call? Do you block or just redirect? Do you implement network-wide or allow subscribers to choose?), but mainly kicks the can down the road hoping for more solutions from the industry. One thing it is concretely moving toward, however, is blocking of calls with blatantly illegitimate caller IDs (000-0000, your number, or a local number when it’s a long-distance call).

The CBC has filed an “as-built” application with the CRTC for CBMT-DT Montreal (CBC Television) so that the commission’s records match what is actually being used. The location, height and signal range are identical, but the transmitter power is actually 363,000 watts ERP instead of 436,340W.

The CRTC has received applications for new radio stations in several markets, and the first step is a public consultation where it asks for opinions on whether the market can sustain another station (and whether there’s other interest in a new application). This week it published notices for:

CBC has also begun threatening legal action against developers of podcast apps supported by advertising. Why? Because you can download CBC podcasts with them and then the ads in the app constitute commercial use. Cory Doctorow is not amused, and neither is Michael Geist, unsurprisingly.

Bell says CraveTV has passed the million subscriber mark. Usual grains of salt to be applied because many people get Crave bundled as part of TV packages so don’t pay full price for it.

Radio-Canada has a story about a freelance photographer on the South Shore working for the local newspaper but also the city government it covers. The paper knew about the arrangement and is OK with it because he’s a freelancer. He says he has the ability to switch hats — even when covering the same event for both parties — and he’s a photographer, not a reporter. Expect this kind of thing to become more common as news media reduce their workforce and rely more on poorly paid freelancers who need other jobs to pay the bills.

At the CRTC

Groupe V Média, which owns V, MusiquePlus and Max (formerly Musimax) has filed a complaint against Bell Canada over the latter’s decision to repackage those two specialty channels. Bell has three packages, Good, Better and Best (Bon, Mieux and Meilleur in Quebec) and is moving them from the Good/Bon ($35/month) to Best/Meilleur ($98/month) in addition to having them available à la carte as the CRTC requires. V looked at the numbers and concluded that this would cost them a lot of subscribers. The exact numbers are redacted, but apparently the vast majority of Bell subscribers who have one of these three packages (many others are on grandfathered packages) have the lowest level. And not like slightly more than half, more like about 95%. This could cost them hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The CRTC has ordered Bell to keep MP and Max in their lowest-tier package until this is resolved. (You can download the complaint letter here. The CRTC has expedited the process and the deadline to comment is tonight at 8pm ET.)

The CRTC has set new standard conditions of licence for TV services. Among the changes, pay TV channels like The Movie Network, Super Channel and Family can now broadcast ads, there is no limit on the broadcast of music videos (since MuchMusic, MusiquePlus et al no longer have genre protection), and pay-per-view and video-on-demand services no longer have to give 100% of revenues from distribution of Canadian feature films to their creators. Other changes could come as a result of a hearing later this month looking at licence renewals for the major broadcasters and a review of local and community programming.

The commission has released a working document in advance of the hearing on big companies’ TV licence renewals, which outlines some key issues to be discussed. Besides the usual discussions of Canadian programming expenditure requirements, issues include:

A proposal by the CRTC to simplify the process of TV stations changing frequency as a result of the upcoming reallocation of 600 MHz to mobile. The new process would require approval of technical changes by Industry Canada but not by the CRTC so that “tight” deadlines could be met.

TV

Quebecor Media is cutting 220 jobs, including 125 at subsidiary TVA Group, representing about 8% of its workforce. There are few details, other than centralization of advertising sales and the shutdown of two small magazines.

Radio

Some updates since the news that TTP Media purchased the AM broadcasting transmitter in Kahnawake from Cogeco Media. Testing has begun for the 940 AM station, which was transmitting a high-pitched tone (likely to tune the antenna and confirm signal strength at short distances) during the day last week. Industry Canada confirms its status as “on-air testing” and lists a callsign: CFNV. The Kahnawake council also sent out a note confirming the testing at 940. Reception reports have been coming in from eastern Ontario and the northern U.S. Because 940 is a clear channel, its reach should be much farther when it begins testing at night. Still no public statement from the owners, or any news about studios, talent or a launch date. There’s also no news about 600 AM, which has a week until its next deadline to launch (expect a request for an extension).

Incidentally, Monday was apparently the deadline to express interest in buying Rogers’s French magazines, according to TVA Nouvelles.

As part of Quebecor’s triple-digit job cut, TVA Publications will be shutting down two magazines: Chez Soi (home decor, 10x a year, 410,000 average print readers) and Tellement Bon (recipes, 6x a year). TVA Publications has plenty of other magazines whose content overlaps.

The Toronto Star released its financial results, and while the bottom line is good, just about all the details are bad. Star Touch, the La Presse-like tablet app, has about a third of the expected readers, but the Star is staying committed to it.

Online

Those “around the web” or “you might also like” or “promoted stories” ads that link to sometimes legitimate and sometimes really sketchy stories elsewhere on the web are getting so bad that publishers are rethinking whether to have them despite the revenue they bring in.

Speaking of the FPJQ, the organization also does its elections during its annual conference. The candidate for president is a familiar name to anglo Montrealers: CTV’s Stéphane Giroux, who has been on the board for three years.

CBC executives appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on Tuesday. We didn’t learn much that’s new (mainly politicians questioning their competition for ad dollars and dealing with pet gripes), but I wrote a story about it anyway for Cartt.ca.

At the CRTC

The commission has released its annual Communications Monitoring Report. Look at all the statistics! There’s enough of them to push whatever agenda you want. But generally, traditional broadcasting is in slow decline, TV subscriptions are flat (as the population grows), and specialty TV channels generally still make a lot of money. One concerning statistic though, young people (ages 12-24) listen to half the traditional radio that other age groups do (partly because of technological changes, but party I’m thinking because that group doesn’t have cars).

The commission issued a series of mandatoryorders against broadcasters who were using licences for tourist information stations in Surrey, B.C., to broadcast general programming.

Went to see the progress of our new CBC station in Iqaluit.The studio is looking amazing! Move in date: Nov. 25th. pic.twitter.com/yc0Wu741aj

For those who wonder why the Maple Leafs always get CBC on Saturday nights, consider this: On opening weekend (albeit a big ceremonial home opener for Toronto), the Leafs-Bruins game had an audience of 1.5 million, while the Canadiens-Senators had half a million on City.

Cord cutting, while definitely a thing, hasn’t done to the TV industry what online advertising has done to the newspaper industry yet. A U.S. consulting firm says it’s overblown. And the CRTC numbers (see above) show that TV distribution is about flat, though as the population increases, the penetration rate drops. It’s now below 80% of households, but that’s still the vast majority.

Corus’s Toronto news-talker AM 640 has a new lineup that includes a morning show hosted by Matt Gurney (poached from the National Post) and Supriya Dwivedi (a freelancer who co-hosted the Canadaland Commons podcast), with Global Toronto’s Jeff McArthur as a contributor.

Outside of Montreal, Maisonneuve was better known as “Katfish Morgan”, and for the past decade worked at Live 88.5 in Ottawa. The station, owned by Newcap Radio, posted a tribute to him on Saturday.

Maisonneuve worked in radio for 18 years before getting a gig here in his hometown, at stations in London, Ont., Calgary, Halifax and Toronto. In 1998, he was named the morning man at Mix 96, along with Ted Bird. A year later, Bird reunited with Terry DiMonte on CHOM and Maisonneuve was paired with Nat Lauzon. (They notably inaugurated their new show by driving a Zamboni to Toronto, which garnered them some media attention in small towns along the 401.)

Lauzon, who had also worked with Maisonneuve at Mix 99.9 in Toronto a couple of years earlier, took the news particularly hard. Even before he died, she had often shared cherished memories of the Andre and Nat show on her Facebook page.

I asked Lauzon for comment about her friend’s passing. She didn’t want to talk on the phone because of her fragile emotional state, so she wrote this to me instead:

In a terrible year where we have lost so many of the greats, I consider Andre among them.

Andre could do anything. He was that rare blend of uber-talented jock but with the kind of vulnerability that allowed listeners to know him as a person, too. He was warm, kind, interested, creative and genuinely, naturally funny. On the air, Andre would take you places that were silly and ridiculous, then grow them and explore them without fear. And if they bombed, so what? And if they were winners, so what? The joy was in getting there, the reward was in trying. He was never afraid to be the foil or take chances. But more so, he was happy to stand back and let you shine. He could trust a moment and let it breathe instead of filling it will noise. He knew how to work WITH people, on the air. He was a careful listener and built the moment instead of clamouring for punchlines. (I don’t need to tell any “radio person” how rare a quality this is.)

He was a master of voices, with an impressive and ever-expanding stable of impersonations and characters. In a radio age, where so many “bits” come packaged from prep services, we wrote our own. Because Andre could handle any special voice requirements those bits entailed — from impersonations to accents to singing … it was endless, often surprising even himself! We laughed. So much. Andre had a winning, engaging laugh.

What I’ve said here of course, is all radio-related and barely scratches the surface of who he was personally (and at one point, I hope to write more on that), but it’s not difficult to find echoes of these same sentiments from across the country, from folks who knew Andre at various points in his lengthy radio career.

Andre was my colleague, but he was also my big brother and my teacher and my friend. His is a huge loss to radio — but also to those who loved him. My heart breaks for his two amazing kids, who he was fiercely proud of. I am hardly alone in admitting that losing him has me roiling with grief and anger. Very simply, I adored him. I will love and miss him always.

Maisonneuve and Lauzon broke up (work-wise) in 2002 when the station’s lineup was shuffled and both moved to other parts of the day. He went back to the morning show in 2004, paired with Lisa Player. In 2005, Maisonneuve moved to Ottawa for the launch of Live 88.5 (CILV-FM) and became Katfish Morgan again. He stayed there until just recently, when his disease forced him off the air, though he didn’t publicize that fact.

The station’s tribute reads in part:

Andre was a great broadcaster, a tremendous team player and a fearless leader.

Andre gave birth to LiVE 88.5. He “lived life large” and he was an absolutely magnificent human being. He taught us all to live in and for the moment. All those that enjoyed the pleasure of his company on and off the air knew and felt that he was always “present.” We built an entire radio station on those very same principles.

Andre was a truly loyal friend to all who knew him. He had a real zeal and a “lust for life” like no one we have ever known.

For those who don’t have a financial stake in Postmedia, these numbers may not matter to you. But more significant for people in the media industry is the company’s response: It wants to cut its total payroll by 20%. After implementing changes over the past year, including staff reductions, that reduced its operating expenses by $75 million a year, it’s doing the same again, cutting a fifth out of its $361-million payroll.

Assuming the cuts are evenly spread, this would mean Postmedia losing about 800 of its 4,000 employees at newspapers including the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Toronto Sun, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun/Province and lots of smaller papers.

The company plans to do this in part through a voluntary buy-out program, which means I may lose some more colleagues. And I’m not 100% reassured that my own job is safe.

This is only the latest triple-digit staff reduction to come to a Canadian media giant in the past decade. Bell, Rogers, Quebecor, CBC and others have also made significant cuts, which increases the supply of journalists in the marketplace and makes it harder for others, particularly young people, to find jobs in the field.

News about news

Ezra Levant is appealing to his favourite shiny pony, Justin Trudeau, after The Rebel was barred from covering a UN climate change conference because it’s an “advocacy media”. Canadian journalism organizations are supporting The Rebel, and an organization like the UN should be as open as possible within reason, though no one could really argue that The Rebel isn’t more about advocacy than journalism.

The commission has approved the acquisition by Attraction Radio of CFLM-FM in La Tuque, which was announced in April. The purchase price is $640,000. This gives Attraction 14 radio stations throughout Quebec, almost all in small towns.

After a lot of talk in the media about changes to the points system used to determine whether a television series is Canadian enough to get access to funding by certified independent production funds, the CRTC has posted a new page to its website explaining the change, but more clearly downplaying the negative effect this would have on the Canadian-ness of Canadian television.

Dr. Charles Kowalski, the guy who took out a full-page ad in the Gazette to express anger at the P.K. Subban trade, prompting people to complain that he did that instead of donating to the Montreal Children’s Hospital, only to find out he donated $50,000 to the hospital? He has upped his donation to $250,000.

Weeks after bringing Corus TV stations CHEX-DT Peterborough and CKWS-DT Kingston into the Global News fold, they’re doing the same with CHEX-TV-2 (branded Channel 12 Durham), which will air both a local newscast and rebroadcast Global Toronto’s news at 5:30 and 6. The three stations, which Corus owned before it bought Global from Shaw, will remain CTV affiliates in primetime, but this change means dropping CTV National News from the schedule at 11pm.

Nicolas Tétrault, one of the partners in 7954689 Canada Inc., posted two videos to YouTube last week that showed the Kahnawake transmitter site that the new stations at 600 and 940 AM are set to broadcast from. In one of them, Tétrault describes the installation as having been purchased that week from Cogeco Media.

The videos were removed shortly after they were noticed and I sent an inquiry to Tétrault about the status of the stations.

But Richard Lachance, president of Cogeco Media, confirmed to me that the transmitters, towers and other assets at the site were indeed sold. The purchase price, he said, is confidential.

Meanwhile, the ttpmedia.ca domain name that the group had let lapse was re-registered about the same time, Oct. 11. It’s a parked domain and the records don’t indicate its owner. An email sent to Tétrault’s address, which bounced this summer, seems to have gone through this time, but I don’t know for sure if he received it.

Though these signs are encouraging — the transmitter purchase would make no sense if they weren’t serious about putting these stations up — the group is up against tight deadlines.

On Nov. 9, the CRTC’s “final” deadline to launch the English news-talk station at 600 AM hits. And Nov. 21 is the “final” deadline to launch the French station at 940 AM. I write “final” in quotes because the CRTC’s first “final” deadline to launch at 940 was actually November 2015, but they changed their mind and granted another one.

Technically, the deadlines are to get the stations operational, which requires a period of on-air testing first. But it’s possible the CRTC would be lenient if at the deadline the station is at least doing said testing. This, of course, says nothing about all the other issues involved, like programming. There have been no high-profile (or even, to my knowledge, low-profile) poachings of staff from other radio stations or other announcements that would suggest they’re lining up talent yet.

A check of the 600 and 940 AM frequencies also shows no test signal on either.

It’s a small step and we know little else, since the partners still won’t talk. But the purchase of the site, even though it was supposedly being finalized a year ago but only closed this month, is a solid step forward.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said the YouTube video mentioned only the 940 station. Someone who watched it heard mention of 600 as well, so maybe my memory is faulty.

On Monday, the Montreal Gazette will be presenting awards in the form of bursaries to students in Concordia University’s Journalism department. As has become sort of a tradition for the past half-decade, I’m so lazy that I’m only now writing up my interviews with the winners of last year’s awards (which to be fair, were given out in January) and the year before (uhh, my dog ate it?).

I chatted with each of them briefly about their origins, their futures, and what they think about journalism. Here’s what they had to say:

But as I noted, and as Ray noted, and as the CRTC noted, nothing in the conditions of licence prevents them from doing this. The ethnic broadcasting policy incorporated into the licence conditions says that a certain number of languages and ethnic groups have to be served, but does not place a minimum or maximum number of hours.

The only place where CKIN-FM broke its licence conditions was (coincidentally?) during the week sampled by CHOU when it came two languages short of its required eight. The station explained this by saying that there was a schedule change, and two programs that aired on Saturday one weekend and Sunday the next were just outside the sample week (weeks are defined as Sunday to Saturday). This is a very reasonable explanation (though broadcasters should exceed their requirements to give themselves more flexibility and avoid situations like this), and the CRTC agreed.

CKIN-FM’s licence is up next August, and issues of licence compliance can come up again when the CRTC considers licence renewal.